The furrowed face of fortune's force my pinching pain doth move. Virginius slays his daughter on the stage and serves her head up in a charger before Appius, who promptly bursts into a cataclysm of C's ('O curst and cruel cankered churl, O carl unnatural'); but there is not a suggestion of the pathos noticed in _Cambyses_. Instead there is in one place a sort of frantic agitation, which the author doubtless thought was the pure voice of tragic sorrow. It is in the terrible moment when, after the heroic strain of the sacrifice is over, Virginius realizes the meaning of what he has done. Presumably wild with grief, he raves in language so startlingly akin to the ludicrous despairs of Pyramus and Thisbe that the modern reader, acquainted with the latter, is almost jarred into laughter. O cruel hands, O bloody knife, O man, what hast thou done? Thy daughter dear and only heir her vital end hath won. Come, fatal blade, make like despatch: come, Atropos: come, aid! Strike home, thou careless arm, with speed; of death be not afraid. Of such eloquence we might truly say with Theseus, 'This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad.' In 1562 Tragedy, as we have said, took refuge in an imitation of the Senecan stage: translations of Seneca's tragedies had begun to appear in 1559. _The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex_, or _Gorboduc_, as it was originally and is now most commonly named, marks a new departure for English drama. To understand this we ought perhaps to say something about the essential features of a Greek tragedy (Seneca's own model), and make a note of any special Senecan additions. What strikes one most in reading a play of Aeschylus is the prominence given to a composite and almost colourless character known as the Chorus (for though it consists of a body of persons, it speaks, for the most part, as one), the absence of any effective action from the stage, the limited number of actors, and the tendency of any speaker to expand his remarks into a set speech of considerable length. This tendency, especially noticeable in the Chorus, whose speeches commonly take the form of chants, encouraged the faculty of generalizing philosophically, so that one is constantly treated to general reflections expressive rather of broad wisdom and piety than of feelings directly and dramatically aroused; much also is made of retrospection and relation, whether the topic is ancient history, the events of a recent voyage, or a barely completed crime. The sage backward glance of the Chorus is quick to discover in present ruin a punishment for past crime; so that the plot becomes in a manner a picture of the resistless laws of moral justice. Speeches, a moralizing Chorus, actions not performed but reported in detail, a sense of divine retribution for sin, these are perhaps the qualities which, apart from the poetry itself, we recall most readily as typical of a Greek tragedy.